NASA’s Perseverance rover begins long climb up Martian crater rim
A navigation camera aboard NASA's Perseverance rover captured this view as the rover left the "Bright Angel" area of Mars' Jezero Crater on July 30, 2024, the 1,224th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
After three and a half years exploring Jezero Crater’s floor and river delta, NASA’s Perseverance rover will ascend to an area where it will search for more discoveries that could rewrite Mars’ history. As members of the Mastcam-Z camera team for the rover, Earth and Planetary Sciences graduate student Eleni Ravanis and her advisor Sarah Fagents, researcher in the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, will be looking for rocks on the crater rim that might provide detailed insights into the earliest period of the planet’s history.
“Our samples are already an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our understanding of Martian geologic history,” said Ravanis. “This is because we expect to investigate rocks from the most ancient crust of Mars. These rocks formed from a wealth of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined up close before.”
Since February 2021, the rover has been exploring the floor of the 45 km-diameter Jezero Crater, where an ancient delta provides a window into the fluvial history of the area. During that phase of the mission, the rover collected the first sedimentary rocks ever sampled from a planet other than Earth. These sedimentary rocks in particular are important because they formed when particles of various sizes were transported by water and then deposited into a standing body of water; on Earth, liquid water is one of the most critical requirements for life as we know it.
Perseverance recently began the months-long ascent up the western rim of Jezero Crater that is likely to include some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has encountered to date. The rover operators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory say that the rover may have to climb slopes of as much as 23 degrees, and eventually the rover may have gained more than 300 meters in elevation from its original landing site.
On the Crater Rim Campaign, Ravanis is one of the science leads meaning she will provide input into where the rover drives and what rocks should be investigated along the way. These promise to be exciting times, as the rover should see very ancient rocks, perhaps more than four billion years old, that were excavated by the formation of Jezero crater.
“I am very excited for the rover to investigate rocks in and on the crater rim thought to be a part of geological units that are very widespread on Mars,” said Ravanis. “These likely include the very ancient crust, the products of ancient volcanic eruptions, and rocks altered by water that date from a time when Mars had a very different climate to today. Examining these rocks up close and sampling them for later return to Earth will inform our understanding of not just Jezero Crater, but the planet Mars as a whole and through time.”
Read more on NASA JPL News.